I'm generally a seller of the whole "social discovery" web application movement, but for things like movies, I have one or two friends whom I depend upon heavily for "social discovery" (I'll usually email them about what I'm looking for) in having great movies recommended to me personally :).

I very much agree with that approach. A curated monolithic ranking is hard to build up and maintain. Personal recommendations are truly hard to beat.

That's just it though while Doctor Strange Love (1964) was #32 and Up (2009) was #924 there both vary good movies. There was plenty of recent and fun movies vary low on the list, consider:

Bowfinger (1999), Solaris (2002), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), From the Village to the City (1974), Going Postal (2010), Legally Blonde (2001) that's that's 4913 to 4918.

PS: Granted, rating movies is a huge multi dimensional problem, just ask Netflix, but you don't need a lot of accuracy to find a good movie.